Frequently Asked Questions
- What is Competitive Price Intelligence?
- How does Gazaro track prices?
- Is Competitive Price Intelligence new?
- What do you mean by quality of data?
- Who in my organization can benefit from Competitive Price Intelligence?
- Is Competitive Price Intelligence legal?
- Can Gazaro integrate with our IT systems, such as ERP systems?
- How many products and competitors can I track?
- Is there any software involved?
- How quickly can I see results?
- How much does it cost?
Q1: What is Competitive Price Intelligence?
As a process, Competitive Price Intelligence is the set of legal and ethical methods for collecting, developing, analyzing and disseminating actionable information pertaining to product prices of competitors, suppliers and manufacturers (Strategic and Competitive Intelligence Professionals – SCIP 2009).
As a business solution, Competitive Price Intelligence is actionable information about the present and future behavior in relation to the pricing of products of competitors, suppliers and manufacturers in the current market and general business environment.
Q2: How does Gazaro track prices?
Gazaro’s Extensible Fuzzy Reasoning Engine (XFiRE) is a massively-scalable, cloud-based engine that crawls, extracts, stores and analyzes retail pricing data. The Platform contains one of the world’s largest and most accurate databases of retail pricing, with over 1 billion data points and increasing by millions daily.
Q3: Is Competitive Price Intelligence new?
No, any company that scans competitor websites, visits competitor stores, reads competitor weekly flyers and/or incorporates price matching or Everyday Low Price policies (EDLP) is practicing competitive price intelligence. The revolution is in how Competitive Pricing Intelligence is being practiced. Technology can scale and mimic 100,000 street teams, in addition to providing analytical data that can be directly used to positively impact an organization’s bottom-line.
Q4: What do you mean by quality of data?
There are certainly many developers that can develop crawlers to fetch data, but the result is just a “data dump” of information with no real usefulness to your organization. Gazaro has invested over 15 man years in the development of a scalable machine learning platform for the real-time collection, classification, and analysis of products. The Gazaro Extensible Fuzzy Reasoning Engine (XFiRE) platform crawls in real-time, extracts and stores the data (multiple millions daily), and then proceeds to continuously analyze and match the same and equivalent products from different stores. The resulting data provided has unmatched accuracy and the subsequent analytics can positively impact your pricing policies and your bottom line.
Q5: Who in my organization can benefit from Competitive Price Intelligence?
Price Intelligence benefits many users in an organization:
CEOs – In an instant, know where you stand with respect to the competition, from the web or from mobile devices.
CFOs – Use Real time insights on how your prices relate to your competitors to maximize your profits via better product mix and pricing strategies.
CMOs – Optimize your price and product mix with intelligence tools that allow you to compare your prices to your competitors in real time and identify differences in pricing strategies.
COOs – Gain a competitive advantage by increased visibility into pricing trends and changes.
Pricing Managers – Use competitive intelligence to gain a better view of the industry and make more effective pricing decisions.
Product Managers – use real time competitive data to identify revenue opportunities and maximize sales through optimal product mix.
Category Managers – Leverage competitive pricing intelligence in real time to easily identify the best times for product mark downs and sales. Maximize sales by knowing your competitors moves as they make them and shorten your response time.
Brand Managers – See how your product prices relate to other brands and protect your pricing position in the market place.
Channel Manager – Enables better price visibility within distribution channels.
Store Managers – Use real time pricing intelligence to build a strategy for differences in prices between locations. Know more about the different prices available than your customers and use those insights to build a strategy that aligns with your brand and positioning.
Buyers – Use competitive price intelligence to improve your negotiation outcomes, and to research new distribution channels and product sources.
Q6: Is Competitive Price Intelligence legal?
Yes, Competitive Price Intelligence involves gathering information and data by ethical means and available in the public domain, then applying technology and analytical tools to fill in the blanks.
Q7: Can Gazaro integrate with our current IT systems systems such as ERP systems?
Yes. Gazaro is a fully flexible and fully scalable system that can easily integrate with software and systems such as Enterprise Resource Planning systems.
Q8: How many products and competitors can I track?
You can track and analyze an unlimited amount of products and competitors. Gazaro PriceIQ™ can provide you with robust solutions based your unique needs and budget.
Q9: Is there any software involved?
There is no software involved. Gazaro delivers the information to you in a software, or as data-as-a-service, including an easy-to-use online portal, excel and csv reporting via download or email, or via API. All options are accessible by computer, tablets, smartphones and other web-enabled devices.
Q10: How quickly can I see results?
We can generally provide you an initial analysis within a day, and have your product and competitor tracking in place within a week. If you have a very large scale project, we will work with you to establish an implementation schedule to ensure that you are satisfied with each milestone before we proceed to the next one. To speak with a Gazaro consultant or to schedule a demo, please click here.
Q11: How much does it cost?
The fees depend on the number of products and competitors that you want to track. Regardless of your volume, the value of the information is so high that you can expect the service to pay for itself many times over. To find out more or to schedule a demo, please click here.